"If you want to go fast, you can go alone but if you want to go far, go together in a team"

Often referred to as “Dynamic Entrepreneur Born”, Debajyoti is known to take on any sort of challenge thrown at him. This has given him much credence in his career as a go-getter. He excels mostly at everything is undertakes and his appetite to taste the new water makes him stand tall in the crowd of skilled professionals. He has more than a dozen accreditations and awards to his name, which highlight his ingenuity.

He is a post-graduation in Marketing and a B.Tech in computing sciences. Debajyoti is very down to earth, calm and composed person with intellect and great interpersonal skills. He is very organized and disciplined in his personal life. Over the years, he has taken several jobs giving him ample experience in the desired field. Now he runs his own company that boasts to be a premier digital marketing agency.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Seven Boats Info-System Pvt Ltd is a leading strategic digital marketing company & our core services include the following two divisions:

We have given digital marketing consultation to more than 500 international & domestic projects in 30+ industry verticals including Health Care/Medical, Education, Engineering, Retail, Business Services, Finance, and many more.

We have been recognized by IITs, felicitated at GMIT, United World School of Business, invited for workshop at Primarc group, awarded with The Bengal Entrepreneurship Recognition 2015, Indian Leadership Award 2012, Listed among top 100 Indian digital marketing companies by Digital Monster Magazine.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

I have evolved in this industry seeing that people are driven by half-baked knowledge about digital marketing & they mostly depend up on old age techniques. Lack of awareness is a big issue and thus people who have requirement are often mislead. Worse that they do not get to see the real picture in a transparent way. There was also dearth of quality digital marketing professionals because of poor ecosystem. These concerns have led me to address the issues in my way – by setting up Seven Boats Info-System. Through our website we are very prominently trying to build the awareness. We give consultation to our clients in a very transparent way, keeping clear communication and keeping them aware about all pros and cons. Moreover, we are developing the ecosystem through training & workshop for students & corporate.

What is your life mantra?

My life mantra is to give back my self learned experience to the society. I aim to build awareness about digital marketing in a trasparent (no-hype) way through training, workshop, personal one-to-one conversation or even mentoring so that it contributes in developing the ecosystem. I wish to see this ecosystem develop into a platform where we can work in a collaborative way & grow.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

Few rejections in interview & my decision 5 years back to start up a company, I was sarcastically greeted by people asking so many questions. Have you set up a computer shop? Are you running a cyber cafe? It’s an interesting journey full of ups & downs to see my company grow from ‘zero’ to where it is today. Bootstrapping is one of the most challenging components of the journey having basically no working capital. I have to take along every issue without any external funding. Right team building is the next challenge, when you have to make a perfect balance of quality team, remuneration & company vision.

How did you overcome those challenges?

We are loud & vocal online information provider. We focus on awareness build up, customer acquisition & retention, often up-selling & cross-selling products as per their requirement. Retaining good resource is a challenge and so we do free training, workshop & awareness campaign to nurture resources and keep them motivated.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

We do not have any investor on-board and so far have not committed to any interested investor. However, in the last year a Dubai based investor had shown interest & approached to invest in our business.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

Trust, love, bonding, motivation & love for work. I encourage an environment where the team can work freely. We have a small team of flat hierarchy & our vision is very transparent to all of them. We keep the motivation high & do not appreciate signing on bond paper.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Very good Domain expertise atleast in one sector & hunger to learn new things

Immense Love & Passion about what you do with a clear goal

Perseverance, Risk taking ability & prioritization ability

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

We use Google apps for business, Rapportive, Boomerang, Streak CRM, Freshdesk, Trello, Pocket, Google Keep, Hangouts, Join.me, Mailchimp, Whatsapp and a few more tools for day to day work and productivity.

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

I plan my days/weeks/month. Everyday in morning, I plan for the day by taking quick pointer notes and sort out the priority-tasks and focus to finish them ASAP by deligating them to my team. I also keep slot for ad-hoc & unplanned actitivities. I try to stick to my plan and while doing priority work, I keep my phone redirected to board line no. Or I do not check emails frequently then. This helps a lot to focus.

Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.

For me, sometimes being too perfectionist delays the work, so I want to change that. Instead of being perfectionist, rather focusing to deliver quality work quickly is best for better productivity.

Answer in less than 50 words

One tip to success:

Listen first and then respond (do not react).

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Do not run after short term goal or quick money, go for long term goal.

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

If you want to go fast, you can go alone but if you want to go far, go together (team).

What are your plans for next 3 years?

We want to focus on expanding and excelling in our core expertise areas. We have a plan to bring our training division online and associate more and more people from versatile fields.

If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?

I would love to start with a product company in the same field of digital marketing but obviously not repeating the past mistakes and surely applying my hard learnt experience so far.